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Comment by compuguy | Hacker News Reader

Ouch (and self-hosted atlassian products were pricy to begin with). Are there any good alternatives to Jira and Confluence out there (that are self-hosted/on-prem)?

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I'm of the opinion that there are no good ticketing systems. I've seen a fair few of them (but haven't looked in the last year or two) and I realised that the problem is this: the amount of information you need to store to make a ticketing system really useful is more than people are comfortable putting in. Lightweight ticketing systems are great for small things, but suck for serious work. Heavyweight ticketing systems are a grind to use. Assigning metadata is tedious, remembering workflows is tedious, but if you want more power, you have to do those tasks, regardless of the particular software in use.

> Assigning metadata is tedious, remembering workflows is tedious, but if you want more power, you have to do those tasks, regardless of the particular software in use.

This is why you hire dedicated Scrum Masters / PMO, and direct the PMOs to automate away what they can, as the domain becomes clearer.

Jira is actually really great for this because the REST API is so powerful, which can allow the PMOs to build systems which extract work from elsewhere, populate all the necessary fields which are repetitious and tedious for users to fill out, and then submit everything against the REST API and watch it all turn into issues.

When you start to understand that what Atlassian really did with Jira was build a powerful general UI abstraction over relational tables that even non-technical users can use, then you start to understand the sheer power of what's on the table.

This is why I've finally accepted the fact that for my own personal tracking, nothing beats a post-it note. I'm not going to spend the time to put down all the real information I should and dealing with an app is another barrier preventing me from getting stuff done.

I moved to post-its about six weeks ago during an intense period with lots of small jobs. I am the only one who does what I do here, so the interoperability isn't really required... and I'm not keen on going back to a digital ticketing system (post-its are also satisfying to scrunch up when finished). I will eventually though, as ticket history can be useful, but at the moment I feel a bit like a dog who has escaped the yard and is roaming freely :)

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